The P.U.R.E. Page 13

  “What’s not about me?” The demon himself slithered into the cubicle in front of Jon, eyelids and nose grotesquely swollen, split bottom lip, blood pooled in dark circles below both eyes.

  “Nice tattoo, Doug. Totally suits you.” I taunted him, referring to the faint black letters still visible on his forehead. I had never been more proud of my own handiwork than I was at that moment. I was even prouder of Jon’s.

  Doug smirked. “One PURE down; one to go.” He leveled an imaginary gun at me and pulled the trigger.

  Jon took my arm and shook his head. “Ignore him, Gayle.”

  I shrugged off his hand and marched up to Doug. “You disgusting little worm. This isn’t over by a long shot. I know you were the one who broke into my apartment and trashed it. I’ve got DNA evidence you did it, evidence in police hands now. How stupid could you be, leaving your calling card behind? Your days are numbered, Doug Martin, so enjoy your final moments in the sun because it’s a dark, dark place where you’ll be going.”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t break into your apartment. I don’t even know where you live.”

  “Liar. You had my address written on a piece of paper in your wallet.”

  “Oh, that. I thought you’d left your purse in the office last night. I took out your wallet to get your address. I was going to drop your stuff off on my way home, and this is the thanks I got.” He circled a hand in front of his face. “Last time I play the Good Samaritan for you.”

  Jon pulled me away. “They’ll be here to escort me out in a second. Meet me out front on Elm.”

  He threw his few possessions into his briefcase right as an HR employee and a security guard arrived. Jon handed them his office key, his building access fob and his laptop. The trio walked away toward the elevators.

  Jon glanced at me over his shoulder.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” I said. “I need to grab my stuff. I can’t leave anything unattended.”

  Purse and briefcase in hand, I followed a minute later. I stepped outside and dropped my load to the sidewalk. Jon pulled me into a tight hug.

  “Just let me hold you,” he whispered into my hair before he pulled back and gripped me by the shoulders. “You’ve gotta be prepared for your two o’clock. I was your only witness, but now I’ve been discredited, and you’ve been painted as a vindictive instigator of violence. You know they’ll use the same brush to paint your accusations as retaliation. They’ve got you for incompetence and fraternization, too.”

  “Then I better find something in these two files before two o’clock, or my butt will also be out on the street. We need to go back to Aphrodite. I need to talk to Jayna, and we need to finish reviewing Doug’s work.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  I wasn’t worried about going AWOL at that point because I’d either find the evidence I needed to shift the focus to Doug and Bob, or they would fire me, too.

  Aphrodite wouldn’t be surprised by our return since we’d only left the day before. We could easily play the dumb new hires who forgot a few critical steps.

  I played embarrassed cluelessness quite well.

  Nicky couldn’t hide her enthusiasm over Jon’s unexpected return when we reclaimed the audit room.

  He’s mine now, bitch! Whoa, where’d that come from?

  Jon took the equity file, and I took the inventory file. Part of me kicked myself for not having reviewed them earlier. One kiss and I didn’t care about anything but being Jon’s lover. Why did I keep making the same mistake over and over? He lost his job because of me—if not because of the fight, then because I dragged him into every conspiracy theory I had concocted, whether real or imaginary.

  I compared the final inventory value from our first audit to the value Doug audited. Not much had changed. They agreed to within a minor amount, implying that my and Jon’s counts had indeed been wrong, but I refused to accept that. Switching to the tie-out of the test counts, I fired up my laptop and opened my El Paso observation notes.

  Unlike my first counts, my second counts matched Aphrodite’s. I pondered the meaning. The difference had to lie in the pricing, not the counts.

  “I want to bounce something off you, Jon. If I wanted to overstate inventory, I might inflate the numbers on the first go round. If there was a recount because the first one seemed shady, I’d probably make a clean count, but to keep the value high, I’d inflate the post inventory sales. Does that sound logical?”

  He paused a second, eyes darting back and forth as if reading an imaginary book. “Yes, it does.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  He seemed to watch me for a few seconds as if waiting for me to say or ask something else. I smiled at him before I went back to work again.

  “If they overstated inventory, where did the offset go?” he asked.

  “Sales, I’d assume.”

  “I doubt it went to sales. What if it was used to hide a shortage somewhere else, like cash?”

  “Jon! That’s it! You’re so smart! If someone was stealing money from the company, they’d still need to match what the bank shows. To keep everything in balance, they’d have to increase another account by an equal amount. Inventory! Or a corporate jet! Or a car sold long before we got here?”

  “Jayna has to know something.” Jon’s smile faded into a scowl. “You already figured this out, didn’t you?”

  “I wondered.”

  “Don’t ever do that again.”

  “Do what?”

  “Pretend to be dumb to make me seem smart.”

  “I didn’t! I was only brainstorming with you.”

  “Brainstorming ideas you’d already worked out for yourself!”

  “Sheesh. Sorry.” I muttered to myself, “I can’t win.”

  We simmered in annoyed silence for a while until I rose from my chair.

  “Where are you going?” Jon asked.

  “To talk to Jayna and maybe have a look through the cancelled checks.” I planned to wheedle what I could from her and get the latest bank statement. My backup plan was to account for all the cancelled checks and examine to whom they were payable and who signed the backs of them—a last ditch but tedious task I could ill afford time-wise.

  “I didn’t find anything else, but the five thousand shares of preferred stock are still misclassified. I can get Nicky to give me access to the boxes of cancelled checks. How about I get started on them while you talk to Jayna?”

  “Sure. That sounds like a terrific and original idea,” I said with a touch too much sarcasm and testiness.

  “I’m sorry, Gayle.” He grasped the arm of my chair and rolled it closer to his, leaned over and kissed my cheek.

  My face relaxed into a smile. “Forget about it. We’re both a little sleep deprived and grouchy and dare I mention desperate?”

  He chuckled and motioned with his hand. “Go! Go! Time’s a wastin’.”

  22

  I knocked on Jayna’s door, and she jerked to attention. “Hi.Sorry to bother you, but I need your help wrapping up a few final details.”

  “I thought you guys finished your fieldwork yesterday.”

  “We did … mostly.” I rocked my head like a ditzy blonde. “It’s my first audit of an SEC client, and I’m still kind of learning.”

  “Sure. No problem. How can I help you?”

  I re-explained what Jon and I needed to confirm about some of Aphrodite’s most recent sales without giving away what I really wanted to know.

  “Who’s the customer?” Jayne rose from her chair.

  “The first one is Dalrymple Beauty Consultants dba LD Beauty, and this other one is Elizabethan Investments dba EI Beauty Supply. I think the ‘dba’ stands for ‘doing business as’, right?” I knew what dba stood for, but dumbing myself down seemed the best way to win her trust.

  The dumb-blonde-chick ploy worked but was one I needed to ration so as not to convince the wrong people.

  She stared at me for a few beats. “I-I don’t remember any sales to th
ose companies.”

  “I think I had those names correct. Hang on. Let me double-check.” I flipped through the pages to cure my imaginary memory lapse. “Yes. I got them right. Dalrymple and Elizabethan. They sound very regal, don’t they? Dalrymple. Elizabethan. Anyway, I see several large sales in mid-September and October. Wow, they purchased a lot of stuff right before your fiscal year end, too. I’m surprised you don’t remember big customers like those.” I kept my face as blank as I could.

  Jayna’s distress betrayed itself in her eyes, the stiffness in her shoulders and the firm line of her mouth.

  She rose, walked over to her filing cabinet and quickly flipped through a series of files. “No, sorry, I don’t have anything on file for those companies. Maybe they were misfiled. Can you check other ones instead?”

  I plastered on an apologetic expression. “Unfortunately not. Once we make a selection, we have to stick to it. We can’t switch horses midstream. Maybe they’re in a different filing cabinet, perhaps in the storage room?”

  She focused her gaze at her door, her pictures, her fingernails—everywhere but at me.

  “I could help you search for them.”

  She finally met my eyes, hers glistening with unshed tears.

  I went in for the kill shot. “Aphrodite didn’t sell anything to Dalrymple or Elizabethan, did it?”

  Her head bowed forward, and an almost imperceptible shake of her head followed. The faint splat of a tear hit the papers in front of her.

  “You used the phony sales to inflate inventory to cover up the cash disappearances, didn’t you?”

  She nodded, head still down, the motion dislodging more of her tears.

  Splat, splat, splat.

  “What did you do with the money, Jayna?”

  Her head shot up, her eyes wide with fear. “I didn’t take the money!”

  “Who did?” I already knew—had seen the culprit pilfering blank checks when Jon and I hid in the storage room.

  “Kenneth!” She broke down sobbing, her face a classic tragedy mask. “H-he said he needed the funds to save the company.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “I did at first, but when he never returned the money, I asked him when he was going to, and he said it was all gone. He’d lost all of it.” A quick wipe of her index fingers under each eye cleared the trail of mascara-tinted tears.

  “What did he buy?”

  “Stock options on several publicly traded companies.” She sniffed, grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. Her hitched breathing ceased. “He said it was supposed to be a sure thing.”

  “Where did he get the stock tips?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. He never said, other than his source was very reliable.”

  “How much did Kenneth take out of the company?” I’d estimated the missing money at about five hundred thousand dollars.

  “About five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Once he started borrowing, he couldn’t seem to stop,” she said.

  I mentally patted myself on the back for my forensic work but felt sorry for Jayna, who Kenneth ran roughshod over as his lovesick accomplice. Her complicity in the cover-up, even after Kenneth’s death, roused my contempt as well.

  I nodded at her with sympathy I didn’t feel. “I’m sorry, Jayna, but you did the right thing telling me. Does Arthur know how bad off the company really is?”

  She sat bolt upright in her chair, eyes wide. “No. He trusted Kenneth. Kenneth talked a good talk, and Arthur never questioned him.” Her eyes drifted to the side. “Arthur was already making noise about moving on to his next big idea, especially when Aphrodite starting slowing down.” She refocused her gaze on me and relaxed her posture. “He created Aphrodite for Libby. It was her vanity company, and it did well in the beginning, but once she lost interest, things went downhill fast. Kenneth was only trying to do what he thought best—at first anyway.”

  “I need your help now. I need you to pull the checks or wires or however you transferred the money to Kenneth. Trust me, your assistance will help remove the criminal cloud from over your head, especially with Kenneth unable to back you up.”

  She nodded. “I understand. I almost told you before. You seemed like a sharp cookie despite what Doug said about you. Your boss is a real asshole.”

  “From time to time,” I said with a rueful smile.

  We left Jayna’s office and went to the locked storage area. She opened a file drawer near the one Jon and I had seen Kenneth accessing. Of course that was one drawer we hadn’t had time to dig through. She handed me three files, one marked ‘Dalrymple’, a second marked ‘Elizabethan’, and a third marked ‘Stock options’.

  “Everything you need is in these files.”

  “I’m going to make copies, then I need you to lock the originals in a new location. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. I’ll take them to the bank and put them in my safe deposit box today.”

  “That’s secure?”

  “Yes, of course. I have the only key. What’s going on, Gayle?”

  “A lot more than just a half million dollars of missing cash, Jayna, so you have to keep mum on this. You can’t tell anyone else from Anderson-Blakely—not Doug, not Marilyn and not Bob.”

  “Oh? Oh …” Her features transformed from puzzlement to comprehension. “You’ll contact me when I can pull the files back? When it’s safe?”

  “I will. Thank you so much for your help.”

  Copies in hand, I sprinted to the audit room, where Jon sorted through a huge mass of cancelled checks. We might have spent hours going through them, not knowing exactly what we were looking for.

  “Come on Jon. Let’s go. I’ve got what we need. I’ll explain on the way to the office.”

  We dashed to his Porsche. I needed forty minutes to be at the office by two, a dicey gamble if the tollway and downtown traffic were heavy. Christine’s clock read 1:25 p.m.

  Jon tossed me a bag of Cheetos and a Diet Coke, both of which he’d procured from the Aphrodite break room while I talked to Jayna. I had the best boyfriend in the world.

  “Thanks.” I flashed him my widest grin. “Now Christine, honey, lovely girl, I need you to get us safely to the office no later than two o’clock, girlfriend. You’re a superstar, sweetheart, so let’s go!”

  By an unseen hand or force, my seat tilted back, and my sun visor flipped down. Jon laughed and leaned over to give me a peck on the cheek. “I told you so,” he said still laughing.

  I shared Jayna’s confession with Jon as we made our way south.

  “You know who I think sold Kenneth those stock tips?”

  Jon pursed his lips but kept his eyes on the road. “No, but I’m sure you’re about to enlighten me.”

  “Bob Turner.”

  “Hmm.”

  I shifted in my seat to watch his profile. Only a faint furrow marred his forehead or betrayed any reaction to my theory.

  “Bob had access to that type of information, and he had a financial interest in Aphrodite. Kind of puts a new spin on Kenneth’s murder, doesn’t it?”

  Jon sighed and nodded. “Given Anderson-Blakely’s client list, Bob has access to a slew of insider information. Can’t use the intelligence for himself, so he secretly sells it to others.”

  He rattled his conclusion off like he’d read it in yesterday’s news. Had he already suspected eons ago but never bothered to share with me?

  “This file Jayna gave me contains the stock options Kenneth purchased. I recognize most of them as Anderson-Blakely clients. The others probably are too; I’m just not familiar with them.”

  “How’d you discover the sales to Dalrymple and Elizabethan?” Jon asked.

  “I saw them in the inventory file, only the names were LD Beauty and EI Beauty Supply. I took a wild guess that ‘LD’ was ‘Leslie Dalrymple’ and ‘EI’ was ‘Elizabethan Investments’. Plus, Bob’s hand had to be in there somewhere, and those companies are Leslie’s.”

  “Our kids are going to be
so smart!” He cut his eyes over to me. “Gotcha! I do know that was a weird thing to say … had I meant it … which, come to think of it, I did.”

  “Yet, you said it anyway. I guess you’ve still been making clandestine visits to weirdo land, haven’t you Jon? Tsk, tsk. Clearly you’re going to need a lot of my attention to break you of this troublesome habit.”

  Jon’s eyes flashed with mirth. “Lots and lots, I’m afraid.”

  23

  We parked at exactly 1:55 p.m. I praised Christine profusely for her wily manipulation through the tangled Dallas traffic.

  “I did the maneuvering. Where’s my praise?” Jon pouted with mock jealousy.

  I patted Christine and whispered, “’Scuse me a second, Chrissy, I gotta stroke the male ego. You understand, I’m sure.” I turned to Jon, pulled him to me by his tie and kissed him. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “I can’t go in there. I left quietly as part of my deal.”

  “You aren’t going as an employee. You’re going as my witness. This has nothing to do with your situation … yet. I’m allowed to bring a witness, and they can’t stop me from bringing you, nor can they associate anything you say as not going quietly if it has to do with me. Plus, I want you there with me.”

  He nodded. “I really do want to see how this goes down.”

  We took the elevator to the fifty-fourth floor, where Human Resources occupied half the space. As a service business, Anderson-Blakely’s largest and most valuable asset was its human talent. A large staff dedicated to keeping us in line as well as protecting our interests made sense—in theory.

  Sandy Gomez stood as I approached her office. She walked around her desk and extended her hand. “Hi, Gayle. We’ll be in the Dealy conference room down the hall.” She frowned when her gaze landed on Jon behind me.

  “I invited Jon to accompany me as my witness. I understand he’s no longer employed by Anderson-Blakely, but he’s still my witness, and I want him present. Will there be any problems with that?”

  I’d made a rather cheeky declaration, needing to muster a healthy dose of bravado lest they try to intimidate me into saying or doing something to torpedo my case.